


2000 Ways Not to Make a Lightbulb

by SHCombatalade



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Families of Choice, Friends to Lovers, Functional Dysfunctional Relationships, Gen, Gratuitous abuse of chiromancy, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Not a soulmate AU but totally a soulmate AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-08-20 10:04:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16553720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHCombatalade/pseuds/SHCombatalade
Summary: "The thing about life is that it doesn’t end, even though sometimes he feels like it might."In which everyone fails a number of times, until they don't.





	2000 Ways Not to Make a Lightbulb

**Author's Note:**

  * For [karikes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karikes/gifts).



> a very happy (and much belated) birthday to my dear dear friend <333

Nyota first met Spock in the second grade – room 21, Mrs. O’Brien’s class. Their birthdays were both the ninth of April, though she was turning eight and he was turning six, and they both were sent to the principal’s office on the very first day for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “I don’t hate this country,” she explains to the principal in perfect, precise language, “I just don’t agree with the elementary school indoctrination into its Eurocentric, imperialist history.”

“I’m not American,” Spock adds simply, voice as sharp as the line of his haircut and the angle of his cheekbones. He says a few more things, only a portion of them in English, and Nyota says a lot more things, only a portion of them under three syllables, and the principal rolls his eyes and doesn’t call their parents and releases them back to class.

She takes his hand in the hallway and he freezes, staring at their intertwined fingers in confusion. “My family is from Burundi,” she explains without explaining, because she thinks if anyone else might understand, it might be Spock – his father is the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. but his mother dropped him off this morning in a beautiful pink hijab. “They moved here in the 70s.”

Spock is only five and a half and he speaks English as though it’s not even a second language – maybe third or fourth – in short and specific phrases. Still, he nods his head and squeezes her hand like he knows exactly what she’s trying to tell him. “American media dictates that we are friends now.”

She beams at him, wide around the three missing teeth that haven’t grown in yet. “You’re not American.”

His face does not look like it knows how to smile, but his dark eyes are bright. “I suppose we’re not friends then.”

Six and a half months later they blow out candles on a shared cake, Spock’s mother crowded around the kitchen counter with Nyota’s mother and auntie and three younger sisters and his father called up on a blurry Skype call. Despite the small number, it’s the first time either of them has had a birthday party.

Nine years later they turn the lock of a shared apartment, Spock’s father awkwardly wrestling a microwave onto the kitchen counter while Nyota’s mother and auntie and four younger sisters find places for the numerous unpacked boxes. Despite the cramped space, it’s the first time either of them has felt truly at home.

* * *

Nyota first met Jim when she was eighteen years old – apartment 315, Harvard Off-Campus Housing. They were both in their first week of their first year at college, though she was studying language and he was studying psychology, and they both attended the impromptu party on the very first Thursday of classes hosted by the boys down the hall. He followed her home at three in the morning, unable or unwilling to return to wherever it was he actually lived, and had fallen asleep in her bed without a single attempt at physical contact with her. In the morning he made breakfast for all three of them.

Seven years have passed since that night and quite a lot had changed in their lives, but two key points have remained constant: Jim still has his own apartment but generally prefers Nyota’s (or rather, prefers that it is also Spock’s), and every Tuesday night they all went to dinner at Spock’s grandmother’s house.

Inclusion to Tuesday night dinners was firm and formal – no one was allowed to miss a Tuesday night dinner. _No one_. Not even Leonard, even though he had, until about a year ago, lived about a thousand miles away (he’d been introduced to Savta when he’d been dragged round her house, his first flight to visit since Jim leaving for college unfortunately landing a little past 3pm on a Tuesday. Hasty introductions between Leonard and Spock and Nyota had been made in the car as they fought traffic on the 95, and that had been the beginning and the end of it. He’d put an obscene amount of miles on both his car and his credit card in the years since then.).

Tuesday night dinners were treated akin to a secret society, or the U.S. Supreme Court – once you were in, you were in for life. No exceptions.

“Metukim!” She greets them at the door with an overly exaggerated hug-and-kiss combination each, body frail but hands strong and she pulls each of the boys – she’s barely five feet tall, even Nyota towers over her – down to her level.

Spock returns the kiss with one of his own and a brief murmur of Hebrew – at this point he only speaks his native tongue with Savta, and only as his first and last sentences through her door. And sometimes, so rarely, with Nyota, who blows through the door after him with a rapid flow of fluency that she’s absorbed over the years when no one else has. “Savta!” Jim sweeps her into his arms, hug lifting her off the ground so he can kiss both of her cheeks twice; it’s their own weekly ritual, the way she laughs and slaps at his chest when he releases her, and they all know which of the four is her favorite. Bringing up the rear, Leonard offers her his customary ‘ma’am’ like he _hasn’t_ spent one full year of the past seven seated around her dining table.

“Come,” she urges them, leading the way, “Eat. Tell me about your lives.”

Aside from attendance (mandatory), there’s really only a single rule for Tuesday night dinners: everybody shares. In between dessert and coffee they go around the table, one thing each, and share a single important part of their week. Sometimes the stories are saved, shared for the first time to a captive audience riveted to their chairs. Other times, their voices overlap as they each weave a thread of the story into a more intricate picture for Savta’s enjoyment.

“Azizi,” it’s Nyota’s turn to go first this week, and she shares the news from home. Of her four sisters, Azizi is the youngest at seventeen; she is also the consummate troublemaker of the siblings, a feat worthy of recognition in its own right given the impressive precedent set by the oldest Uhura girl and her childhood best friend. “Has a boyfriend.”

The others _hmm_ and _aww_ appropriately as Spock leans over to spear a strawberry from the mountain of whipped cream that adorns her shortcake. “Is the news that she has one, or that you haven’t killed him yet?” She grins at him, shoving his face away, but twists her ankles with his under the table. There’s more than just a bottle of wine that loosens the atmosphere here – they’re at their most relaxed at Savta’s house, in the sanctitude of Tuesday nights that she’s built up as a reprieve from their regular lives. The rest of the days of the week might be filled with stress and responsibility, but Tuesdays mean family.

Savta pinches both of their cheeks, warm and warning all in one, before passing her attentions to Spock. “I bought organic artichokes for the first time,” he tells them, because he never tells them about work.

“I have still never tried an artichoke,” Jim slides in along the tail end of Spock’s sentence like the hand he slides up the length of Spock’s arm, barely a pause between where one ends and the other begins. Both Savta and Nyota move to intervene – the vegetable argument is an old and ugly one between them, nothing they want rehashed during a Tuesday night.

“I’m going to ask Jocelyn to marry me.”

The room falls silent as Leonard drops a bomb that is barely louder than a whisper. Spock and Uhura straighten in their seats in perfect unison, faces blankly curious, as Jim all but chokes around an ill-timed sip of coffee. The words hang in the air like the photos that hang on the wall, stark black-and-white contrasts with heavy lines and sharp edges, and the quiet they create becomes almost tangible the longer it sustains. The first sound, the sudden noise that shatters the calm, is the squeak of Savta’s chair as she pushes back from the table, moving to his side. “Give me your hand.” She holds her own out to him, impatient, palm up and waiting. “Leonard,” she orders, “give me your hand.”

He does so, as quiet and still as the others now; the admission seems so have stolen his ability to speak.

Fingers twisted with age dance light as butterflies, as ballerinas, across his palm. She traces the lines and callouses with a fierce, almost aggressive determination – Savta reads palms, although she is _not_ a palm reader, she always tells them with a dignified sneer, not one of those street corner hacks. Finally, after three minutes that span a lifetime, she sits back with a smile creasing the corner of her lips. “Your heart and marriage lines are joined,” she tells him, a solemn proclamation. “You have met your soulmate.”

Just like that the spell is lifted and the others clamor to congratulate him – Nyota grabs his shoulder and squeezes, smiling so wide it threatens to split her face, while Spock smiles around a few murmurs of good wishes before Jim shoves both of them away, wrapping the other man in a tight hug. “Good for you, Bones,” he breathes the words against Leonard’s neck before ruining the moment with a sharp punch to his arm. “You guys are great together. Congratulations.”

Leonard ducks his head to hide the blush that always threatens an appearance when he’s the center of attention, aiming a half-hearted return shot at Jim’s ribs. “Don’t know why y’all are congratulating me,” he mutters. “She might not even say yes.”

It’s nothing any of them even bother to consider. “Trust me,” Jim hugs him again. “She’s going to say yes.”

* * *

“I can’t believe she said no.”

It’s Thursday night now, two days since dinner and one since the failed proposal, and the four of them are squeezed around a table meant for two at a dive bar in Chinatown. Leonard is sandwiched between Spock and Nyota, each of them patting an opposite shoulder with awkward platitudes, while Jim perches across from them and fidgets. They’re all trying their hardest to act like it’s any other night, like nothing is wrong, like Leonard’s eyes aren’t red around the edges and his hands aren’t white around the knuckles. It’s all but impossible to pretend.

“I don’t know what happened,” Nyota runs a gentle hand across his back before following the path up into his hair, Jim glaring daggers at the gesture its entire length. He’s been irrationally angry the entire day, ever since learning that Leonard had called _Nyota_ from the restaurant, had spent the night on _her_ couch, and hadn’t even texted Jim or Spock until the following morning. Nyota might have claimed Leonard as one of hers when they were eighteen years old, but Leonard and Jim went back a full eighteen years. “We were all so sure of it for you.”

He twists a napkin in his hands. “Savta said—”

With infinite gentleness, Spock reaches out to cup Leonard’s chin in his hand. “Len,” and even his voice is soft, the caring he’s capable of so rarely displayed. “My grandmother is not a reliable source of concrete information.”

Jim snorts in disbelief, breaking his own rule that today was about Leonard – Bones needs us one hundred and fifty percent today, he’d told them, and they’d listened like they always did because Jim dealt with troubles for a living. “Which is why you cited her at least four times in every paper you wrote as an undergrad.”

“My grandmother is ninety-six years old and has lived on three continents,” Spock says archly. “She’s seen a lot of history.”

“You majored in linguistics,” Jim hisses, and the argument devolves from there; Spock ends it by reaching across Leonard to pinch Jim’s arm viciously, cutting off whatever tirade he’s gearing up for into a startled yelp.

Nyota ignores them, leaning her body along Leonard’s side until there’s barely any space between them, hands in her pockets but pressing against him like a hug. “You guys suck at this,” she murmurs, resting her cheek on Leonard’s shoulder, and Leonard hides a huff of air that would be a laugh in any other situation against her hair.

“Do you want to have her killed?” Spock asks then, without warning, as he takes a sip of his beer; despite being part of their family unit and living with them on and off for at least seven years now, none of them have any idea what he actually does for a living. He graduated _magna cum laude_ and was offered a position a day later by a man in a suit, and sometimes he travels. They never say aloud the words ‘secret agent,’ but they do think them with alarming frequency. “Just say the word, Leonard.”

It says a lot about their lives that he no longer even blinks at the offer. “No Spock, I don’t want to have her killed.”

“Maybe _I_ want to have her killed,” he tells the bottle in his hand – and Jim at his side, who agrees. They’re both ferociously protective of the people they consider theirs, always have been.

Leonard turns his head, craning it painfully sideways, to meet Nyota’s gaze with a long-suffering plea; she’d heard the story in full last night, pieced it together in the time between picking him up outside the restaurant and putting him to bed on the couch. _“She said no,” Leonard doesn’t cry but his voice is shaky, throat tight. “She said that she loves me, she does, but that I know she’s moving to California and that she knows I would go with her and... And she doesn’t want me to compromise my dreams for hers.” This time there are tears, just a few, caught in the tangle of words still coming from his mouth. “Especially because she doesn’t think she could be willing to do the same,” and Nyota’s heart hurt from it all because she wants to hate Jocelyn for this but she can’t. Not when she’d let him down only because she loved him too much to see him hurt._ “We don’t need to have her killed,” she tells Spock instead.

He nods in agreement, taking her word on almost twenty years of trust, while also giving her a look that clearly conveys his order for her to tell them every detail at a later time.

“You know what you need?” Jim dances further outside Leonard’s space, distant in the way he always is when it comes to feelings – as evidenced by his relationship with Spock, which he still won’t call a relationship, and the way he hasn’t been within arm’s reach of his best friend during a time he’s most needed because he genuinely doesn’t know what to do. Jim is a genius about many things, but never this. “To get ridiculously drunk.”

“I can’t get drunk,” Leonard slumps down to hide his despair against the tabletop, voice muffled against the wood, but the words come through clearly enough. “I have surgery in the morning.”

Spock frowns, and Jim blows a loud raspberry through his lips. “No you don’t,” he accuses, eyes sharp. “You don’t work on Fridays.”

Nyota places a calming hand at the base of Leonard’s spine because even though he’s kept the same schedule for the last three years and they all know that he’s lying, he deserves the support of his friends. “He really does,” she lies along with him – she owes him this much. “He’s got an appendectomy at seven.”

Jim’s eyes narrow further. “Appendectomies are done as emergency surgeries,” he doesn’t glare at Leonard, probably because he knows as much as Nyota does that he deserves the lie, but he _does_ glare at Nyota for being included in it. “You can’t _schedule_ an appendectomy.”

“Yes you can,” Leonard almost snarls; he’s too exhausted for any real anger, but there’s a bit of his old bite in the words that almost makes it feel like everything will be okay. Maybe not today, and maybe not any day soon, but someday. “Sometimes you can schedule an elective appendectomy.”

“This isn’t about an appendectomy!”

“I know _exactly_ what this is about!” Leonard and Jim are not brothers, though they openly claim the other as such – they’re not even related, blood or otherwise, and though they’ve all been part of a family unit and living with them on and off for at least seven years now, none of them have any idea how the two know each other to begin with. Spock might have the secretive job, but these two have the secretive past. It’s a trade-off. They do, however, share the same stubbornness and the same temper, a combination of which that sometimes proves lethal when they face off against each other.

“Well,” Spock speaks over them to smooth over the growing tension, “if you’re looking for advice, mine would be—”

Leonard finally pries himself up from the tabletop long enough to fix his friends with a tired glare. “Forgive me if I don’t feel like taking relationship advice from any of you right now,” and if the glare didn’t silence them, the sharpness of his voice does. “But Nyota, your rule is to sleep with everyone _except_ the few people you actually have any form of emotional attachment to, and _you two_ ,” he gestures between Jim and Spock, “still list yourselves as ‘single’ on Facebook despite dating for, what, _five_ years now?”

They confer silently for a moment before Spock shrugs the question off. “More like six. And a half.”

“And we’re not dating,” Jim is quick to add, just as he always is, “just sleeping together.”

A noise of pure exasperation builds in Leonard’s chest and the napkin in his hands is crumpled into a tiny, dense ball. “And living together,” he points out. “And attending family events together. And opening up a joint checking account together.” It’s an old argument.

Spock returns his gaze as nonchalant as though they’re discussing the weather, raising an eyebrow like he’s waiting for him to reach a point. “That means nothing.”

Nyota pops the lime from Leonard’s drink into her mouth unapologetically. “To be fair, most of the people I actually care about are related to me.”

Leonard decides that he was much better off before all this started and returns his forehead to its place of rest on the table. “My girlfriend just shot down my proposal, dumped me, _and_ told me she's moving across the country, and _I’m_ somehow the most emotionally stable of the group,” he slurs. “You should all feel very sad.”

* * *

The thing about life is that it doesn’t end, even though sometimes he feels like it might.

He gets up. Maybe it’s punishment for the lies of the night before, or maybe it’s just some power of the universe sending him the distractions, but he _does_ get called in for an emergency cesarean a little after six, and three debridements in the afternoon. Nyota picks him up after his shift, feet aching and hands chapped from soap and sweat and the sticky insides of his gloves, and wordlessly hands him the box of a still warm Blue Ribbon from Max and Leo’s. “You ready to talk?”

The pizza tastes a little bit like betrayal, but mostly like barbeque sauce. “You weren’t joking,” he mutters around a bite. It might have been intended as a manipulation tactic, but it’s a damn fine pizza and he can’t remember if he ever got around to making it to the cafeteria or not. “The kid gloves come off after forty-eight hours.”

She pets his hair and steals an onion from beneath his hand. “I love you,” she says, mostly to the trail of cheese that tangles around her fingers like a spider’s web, “but you have to talk about this.” His eyes are clear but his nose is red, like maybe he’s blown it too many times or rubbed it a little too hard, and he ignores a slice of what has been consistently voted one of the top five pizzas in the greater Boston area since 2010 to stare at her with a sad, serious expression. “He just wants to know you’ll be okay.”

“Jocelyn left me,” he says quietly, “and I can’t sleep. But I can do my job, and I can take care of my damn self, and—”

“ _I_ know you’ll be okay, because that’s who you are.” In the silence that falls, she helps herself to a piece of his crusts; he doesn’t complain at the theft, because he never eats them anyway. “Spock is the brains, Jim is the heart. You’re the bones. You don’t break.”

They do that sometimes – call him ‘Bones.’ Bag of bones when he dropped all that weight during his clinicals because he couldn’t remember to eat enough times a day, burning calories and candles at both ends for six-day weeks. Rattling bones when he complains about feeling his age, older than the others like there’s a whole generation to be found in those four to six years. Shake your bones when he walks the snail’s pace of contemplation, stopping at windows or doors or anywhere something truly catches his eye or his brain or a moment of rest. He snorts a quiet, not quite laugh. “I broke my femur when I was in the seventh grade. Rolled out of bed right onto the floor and snapped it then and there. Couldn’t walk for eight weeks.”

“Jocelyn isn’t a femur.”

Either he’s mixing his metaphors, or she is. Maybe they’re just making a new one together. “I just meant that bones...” He doesn’t mean bones, or even himself, but he’s lost track of which of them is meant to be the femur and which is the cast, and which is all of the walking he’s been able to do since then. “Bones are a lot more fragile than people think they are.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Bones also heal. Now take your pizza and get out of my car before the whole thing smells like pork and cheese.”

He gets up. He goes to work. Once word gets out about what happened, his department immediately drops Jocelyn’s name from their vocabulary without ever once treating him like he’s about to break. The nurses’ station always has snickerdoodles out during his rotation and the anesthesiologist forfeits his turn for the radio three whole days in a row, and – well, it’s not _nice_ , but slowly it feels a little more normal.

He gets up. He goes to work. He goes to dinners on Tuesdays, and drinks on Thursdays. On Wednesday he lets himself in to Jim and Spock’s apartment after an evening shift that turned into a night shift that turned into an early morning shift and he wakes Jim up with an elbow to the ribs as he flops onto the side of the bed recently vacant for Spock’s morning meditations in the living room. “I really thought she was going to say yes,” he says, voice wet, into the gap between pillows at the head of the bed. Jim lets him cry for a whole twenty minutes before his anxiety over emotions grows too strong and he shoves the pillow down over Leonard’s mouth and threatens to disown him with a kiss planted at his temple.

He gets up. He goes to work. He goes to dinners on Tuesdays, and drinks on Thursdays. He smiles. He laughs. Sometimes he’s angry. Mostly, he’s just sad.

And then slowly, he realizes he isn’t.

* * *

That first month Leonard spends more nights on Nyota’s couch than he does in his own bed. They both know it’s because his apartment is suddenly half as empty as it used to be and so are his whiskey bottles and he’s trying to escape both, but it’s easier to pretend it’s only because he enjoys her company. “Jim still isn’t speaking to me.”

Nyota does not spend the nights on her couch, but frequently her evenings. She lies with her feet draped across his lap, a glass of wine in one hand and the remote held casually in the other. “Jim thinks you’re hurting, and he doesn’t know how to help you.” It’s what he does, both for a living a long before then – helps people. Leonard thinks it’s easiest to see how much they’ve grown up like each other in the way they both fix where people are broken, only Jim tries to fix the injuries that can’t be seen.

“We kidnapped him,” he admits to, instead of admitting that he might still be hurting; he is, but less now, and sometimes he wakes up and it hurts more to think that he’s finally getting over it.

“What?”

“Jim. We – my dad and I – we kidnapped him.” She wordlessly offers the glass of cabernet, which he drains despite hating it, and turns the stem over and over in his hands until she replaces delicate glass with the less delicate arch of her left foot. “My dad was a doctor, one of those small-town urgent care clinic docs, and he got tired of patching Jimmy up so many times.” Pieces of a puzzle that never truly seemed unclear fall into place; Jim helps the broken children he once was, because someone once helped him. Somehow, Nyota feels like she’s always known. “It was clearly abuse, but Jim wasn’t talking and the police weren’t listening, so he...”

He taps the same feigned patience as her morning tea ritual against the bones of her ankle, as porcelain as her mug, and she smiles her approval. “He kidnapped him.”

“ _Technically_ , but his mama brought him in that night with a concussion and a pocketful of important documents, so I think we had permission.” He sighs, feeling the weight of the memories lodge alongside the weight in his chest of a future he’s had to hastily swallow. Sometimes he thinks it’s his fault, the way Jim can’t stand to speak to him anymore; he never learned to keep himself together because Leonard was always there to do it, and maybe he can go to work every day and steady the falling blocks of a broken childhood but only because he knows he can come home and have the same done for him.

Nyota watches him, a question on the curve of her lips and the answer already in her eyes – sometimes she knows them better than they all know themselves. “Jim is not Jocelyn,” she reminds him like it’s nothing he doesn’t already know. “He loves you too much to leave.”

* * *

“Should I get a Tinder?”

There’s not even silence over the line so much as there is a total lack of _anything_ , and he pulls the phone away to check the screen and see if the call has even connected. Five seconds, the count-up greets him. Six seconds, seven...

“Good morning, Leonard,” Nyota finally greets him, like it hasn’t been at least three years since the last time his full name crossed her lips. She sounds more like Spock when she does that, more than she normally does at any rate (or maybe, much more likely, it’s just that Spock sounds so much like _her_. It’s been seven years now and he still can’t tell where one of them ends and the other begins sometimes.), which means that she’s either very annoyed with him or trying very hard not to laugh. “How are you today?”

He shrugs. Even though she can’t see him, he’s sure she’ll know anyway. “That sounds like a ‘no.’”

“Len,” and though her voice is gentle, the laughter so carefully hidden before is less hidden now, “no. No, Tinder is... it’s not for people like you.”

It doesn’t sound like an insult. “Alright. I just googled ‘dating apps’ and it seemed like the one with the most stars, so—”

The sound of their apartment’s Keurig interrupts him, and he politely waits for the cup of tea to finish brewing; Nyota is not kind, not truly, but she is less so before her morning tea. Instead he lets himself be soothed by the familiar noises of a routine he’s come to know by heart: the way she measures sugar and honey in perfect, precise doses. The way her nails tap feigned patience against the chipped rim of her favorite mug. The tiny hiss as she removes the bag from the water and invariably burns her fingertips, every single time. He’s watched her make the same cup of tea countless times.

“How do you feel about casual, no strings attached sex?”

He nearly swallows his tongue. “Umm.” It helps, the hours he’s been working these past two months instead of sleeping, because he can easily blame the way he suddenly feels slow and so very stupid on that – none of them are blushing virgins, not for years, but there’s always been rough-hewn lines among their group that they do not cross. “Not favorable? Why, are you—”

“Len.” Her laugh is a balm against the panic bubbling in his throat, is the soft steel of the hand she would slap against his chest or his arm or his cheek if she were here, is the solidity of boundaries drawn, and just like that the world right itself. She laughs at him and he sighs in relief, and then she laughs again. “Isn’t this the sort of thing you should talk to Jim about?”

Probably. Definitely. It is exactly the sort of thing he would talk to Jim about, but that would entail actually _talking_ to Jim – something they’ve both been avoiding over the weeks, because Jim might be bad with his feelings but Leonard is no better. “Would _you_ talk to Azizi about this?”

“Azizi is a child,” Nyota is quick to defend, as though the age of eighteen has suddenly redrawn its parameters now that the youngest Uhura has reached it. “She’s also my sister, and Jim is...” It takes approximately seven additional seconds to reminder herself that to him Jim is both, and also neither. “Okay, fair.”

“So Tinder is—”

“Yeah it’s a hookup app.” She speaks from experience, both of the app and why it is apparently not for him. “You’re more relationship and love.”

Not for people like you, she’d told him – maybe for people like her, though he’s never considered them different sorts of people at all. For all that she seems to have made it her life’s mission to sleep her way through the greater metropolitan area whereas he thought he was gonna marry the only girl he’s dated since high school, they both love too hard and all too rarely. “And you’re... not?”

Something in her voice deflates. “I’m not... not.” The reason their family unit works as easily as it does is that all of them, every last one, has been desperately searching for a patch of earth to dig their roots into. If anything, the part of this breakup that’s been gnawing him raw is the fact that maybe none of them, him especially, ever learned how to hold on. “I would not be opposed to the idea, if the right person was involved.”

* * *

Jim follows him out of the bar Thursday night after drinks, and follows him all the way back to his apartment. He very nearly follows him into Leonard’s queen-sized bed, like he used to when they were kids, but ever since he surgically excised Jocelyn’s memory from his life there’s only been one pillow. “Spock said if I kept moping around about you he was gonna kill me in my sleep.”

Nyota said the same thing about Leonard only the week before; they’re not the only pair that have grown up too much alike from the exposure. “Spock’s not going to kill you,” he says because he might. Probably won’t, not if he hasn’t yet – they’ve been whatever they’ve been for enough years now that Spock has had plenty of opportunity. Maybe he just hasn’t had quite a good enough reason yet. “For free, I mean.”

“He might.” There’s a twinkle in his eye and set to his grin that tells Leonard far more than he ever wanted to know; Jim is not a baby anymore and is not his brother, except in all the ways he is. “But not in my sleep. He’s classy like that.”

Leonard loves his friends deeply, loves them like family, like the blood in his veins... but they are a _very_ disturbed pair; sometimes he thinks the entire last six and a half years have been some long con, some performance art designed to drive him slowly to the brink of insanity and back. Sometimes, he thinks he might already be there. “Nyota said if I didn’t talk to you she was going to pay Spock to kill me.”

“Hmmm, now _that_ I believe.” Spock might have the shadowy, possibly government job and Jim might have the shadowy, possibly kidnapped past, but Nyota is the one who is absolutely the most terrifying of them. “Nyota will totally kill you.”

“Yeah.” He thinks about all the ways she could, only one of which is asking Spock to handle it, and gets a terrible feeling in his gut. “Yeah, I think she might.”

* * *

He gets off a particularly rough shift at two in the morning, facing down an empty fridge and starving for a pot pie like his mama used to make. It’s a surprise when she answers the phone, even though she’s the only name he can ever think to call. “You up?”

“No,” she tells him, and he has all of a second to wallow in his moment of slipped intelligence before she hangs up; he buys the sweet potatoes she prefers over the Yukon gold anyway.

It pays off because she’s knocking on his door forty-five minutes later, hair down and heels in her hand. “You better have called because you had too much food and were looking to share,” she pours herself into the small living room of his apartment, burrowing beneath the thick knit throw she bought for him (for herself) last Christmas. He gestures quietly to the oven, another ten minutes on the timer, and then to the bedroom; it’s all too easy to recognize what a bad night looks like. Like looking in a mirror.

“I’ll take the couch,” he offers, but she’s already asleep. He lets her get the recommended twenty minutes before waking her up for a late dinner.

* * *

One night, he wakes up in a cold sweat and realizes he hasn’t remembered to be sad in days. He fumbles for his cell phone in the dark of his bedroom, wincing more at the time then the light from the screen, and swipes down to redial his last call.

“Leonard.” She sounds tired, but not from the late hour of the call; she sounds like forming the syllables of his name are a marathon she does not think she can run. “Why do you always call me?”

He doesn’t quite know how to explain to her that he calls not because he can’t think of anyone else to call, or because he can’t think of anyone else who would be up, but because he can’t think of anyone else he wants on the phone at three in the morning. “Nyota... why do you always answer?”

* * *

Six months after Jocelyn quietly hands him his heart back in a crowded downtown Italian restaurant, Leonard goes on a date.

Sort of.

He goes to dinner with the new in town sister of his favorite surgical nurse, covering a favor when she comes down with a nasty stomach bug that leaves her heaving into the phone, begging him to meet her. He agrees because he knows she’s the one behind the snickerdoodles, and because for every single moment of weakness that’s snuck up on him in the operating room these last six months Rowena has been there with quiet, competent strength. Because maybe he doesn’t want to, but he doesn’t hate the idea either.

He meets Amrita at bustling Mexican place a few blocks from the apartment she now shares with her older sister, exchanging introductions and pleasantries to the tune of a rousing birthday mariachi three tables over. She’s quiet, shy in a way her sister isn’t, and he thinks maybe that’s why it takes him as long as he does to realize he’s been set up. “Oh,” he tells her when she laughs at a story he’s told that isn’t funny and isn’t even meant to be for the third time. “This isn’t just tacos, is it.”

She twirls her hair – long and dark and thick, the ends dyed a deep purple color – around her fingers and smiles unrepentantly. “My sister says that you are a good man.”

“I’m sure she thinks I’m a good surgeon,” he corrects her, because he’s grown enough to admit exactly what nurses think about surgeons, even the good ones. “And apparently a decent enough man to take out her sister.”

The twirling goes from flirtatious to fidgety. “I know you’re not seeing anyone,” she whispers, like it’s a secret – like he doesn’t already know. It suddenly takes any of the laughter out of the situation, the way he wonders exactly what she knows, and how much. There’s a very different man to be found between ‘broken up’ and ‘broken-hearted.’

“Yeah, no... I’m not, but...” He’s not seeing anyone, but he isn’t quite ready to say that he’s single; at least to him, single means he’s ready to get back out there, and he’s not sure that he is. It’s not even that he’s still in love with Jocelyn, because every day he gets farther away from that restaurant he wonders if maybe both he and Savta was wrong and maybe he never did to begin with. “It’s complicated.”

After he walks her back in an awkward silence and makes sure she gets through the door safely – Rowena hollers something angry and offensive sounding from behind the bathroom door at Amrita once Leonard calls in what’s happened. Apparently she hadn’t known it was meant to be a date either – he calls Nyota. She’s slow to answer the phone this time, the fourth ring instead of the second or first, but when he tells he about the dinner she laughs at him for just long enough that he starts to see the humor in it as well.

* * *

Nyota surprises him in the living room when he’s watching football; it’s the final quarter and Yellow Jackets are _crushing_ the Bulldogs, which is his excuse for not hearing her let herself into his apartment and apparently raid his kitchen, if the bottle of beer is anything to go by. “Leonard.” It’s the most exciting play of the season but he shuts off the television without a second of hesitation because everything about her – coolly expressionless, casually dressed – is screaming a trauma.

He wordlessly shifts to create space for her to curl up beside him, sliding her body between his and the arm of the couch and her ankles knock against his where they rest on the coffee table. “Nyota.”

She raises a beer and a perfectly manicured eyebrow, unimpressed. “Spock has told me that he is leaving.”

The words are spoken like they’re meant to crash in a wave instead of lapping a puddle, but he already knows. Spock might have waited until the eleventh hour of their lease renewal to tell Nyota he planned on moving out, but Jim had come to him the day they’d decided for a good half hour of quiet panicking. “Yep,” he mentions noncommittally, and frames the noise with a quiet sip from the bottle he takes easily from her grip.

She hits him, because that’s how they settle things between them, but this time it’s with a pillow and he doesn’t stop smiling. “I am happy for them,” she finally tells him, and he knows that she is – they don’t often talk about the relationship between Jim and Spock, mostly because they both deny even being in a relationship, but it’s a sense of stability for their entire group. “It’s just—”

“Yeah,” Leonard says like he gets it; he does. “Life goes on.”

* * *

One Thursday at the bar a very pretty young lady gives Leonard a napkin with her number on it, and he lets her.

While she makes it back to her groups of friends with the same quiet confidence she’d approached him, blushing prettily, his own friends take it upon themselves to be as embarrassing as possible; the hooting and whistling continue only until her group is out the front door, and then Nyota snatches the paper from his hand. “Becca,” she reads, and folds the napkin in half. “Nice job, Len.”

He grins at her, feeling a little less tragic and a whole lot more tipsy. “What do you think?” The napkin sits like a flower in the palm of his hand, and he crinkles the edges under his thumb. “Am I ready for this?”

She looks him up and down, considering, and follows the path the woman had taken to the door; her gaze lingers over the table the ladies had abandoned, and she shrugs. “She just got out of a relationship, but either it wasn’t serious enough or he wasn’t good enough for a period of mourning. She’s looking to rebound.” It’s more than a little impressive, and more than a little frightening, that she’s managed this from the four seconds Becca had been in range of their table; Spock looks at her with something fierce and proud behind his eyes. “I heard her talking to her friend in the bathroom earlier.”

He laughs. “So tell me,” and he hasn’t felt sad in quite some time but he can’t remember the last time he felt this _light_ , either. “Am I a rebound sort of person?”

“That’s for you to decide, Len.” There’s a pitcher of beer in the middle of their table and another waiting for them at the bar, but this alcohol doesn’t have the same burn as the whiskey he hasn’t touched in his apartment for months now; he thinks it might be the company, and maybe also a little bit of healing. “But it’s a slippery slope from here. Soon you’ll be downloading Tinder.”

Jim takes out his wallet and presses a dollar bill into Spock’s back pocket. “You’re hired. Kill me.”

Spock finishes his drink, and then finishes Jim’s. “Gladly.”

* * *

He doesn’t call Becca, and he doesn’t know why.

(Or maybe he does – he doesn’t call her because it doesn’t seem fair, calling someone just because he feels lonely.)

* * *

Spock moves out, and apparently a squirrel moves in – or, at least, that’s what he gathers from Nyota’s frantic call one Saturday afternoon.

“Someone left a window open,” she’s half laughing and half crying, voice wet with the bubbles of humor and hysteria rising to the surface. He wants to laugh with her, maybe even at her a little, only she’d started the call with ‘Leonard, _please_ ’ and he can’t remember the last time someone begged him for anything outside of bringing life back to the dead. “And, I don’t know, maybe some food on the counter?”

“Spock and Jim are gone,” he says calmly, because if he isn’t calm he’s going to be cackling into the phone too loud to hear anything she says. “So I guess that means _you_ were the messy roommate.”

The break in her voice is not from anger, he knows that much, but it might be a little bit from irritation; mostly at the squirrel, but a little bit fairly directed at him. “Shut _up_ ,” she laughs and cries and growls into the phone, “and come get it out of the pantry.”

He goes, mostly because he knows he’s going to end up there at some point this evening anyway, and it may as well be now.

“Holy shit,” he tells the room at large when she opens the door just enough for his to slide through. “One little squirrel did all of _this_?” The kitchen is a warzone of pots and crumbs and dented cans strewn across the floor, and nearly every cabinet has been opened. _Shut **up**_ she snorts and groans and whispers, and that’s when he knows it didn’t – she’s thrown everything she’s got, quite literally, into chasing the creature out of her apartment. “Did you every think of just leaving the window open and letting it find its own way home?”

She looks at him like he’s stupid, like she wishes she had another can to throw. “I got tired of waiting,” she says instead, and hands him a broom.

* * *

It’s somewhere in the vicinity of four in the morning when every moment of the past eleven months plays out like a movie in his head, starting with the night Jocelyn dumped him. It culminates in a car crash of realization that has him catching a cab over to Nyota’s apartment and – cognizant of the neighbor next door who always, _always_ , complains – tapping insistently at her door.

She opens it like maybe she hasn’t been sleeping either. “Nyota.” Her hair is a mess and there’s mascara smudged in the creases of her eyes and she glares like she’s about to beat him to death against the doorframe, and his second realization of the night is that he probably should have just called her like he always does, only— “You’re the first person I want to talk to whenever I have something to say.”

“Leonard.” She sighs his name, and laughs ruefully. He _needs_ her to know that he doesn’t call her because he’s lonely or sad or knows that she’ll answer, but because his favorite conversations are ones where he can hear her voice. “I _hate_ talking on the phone...” When she grins at him, a little bit shy and a whole lot sharp, he feels like maybe she already knows. “Unless the right person is involved.”

She kisses him, swallowing down whatever late-night revelations he might finally be reaching, and pulls him into her apartment. This time, he doesn’t sleep on the couch.

* * *

“Metukim!” Savta greets them with her customary hugs and kisses, loud with enthusiasm like it’s been months since they’ve last visited and not merely a week; she lingers especially long at Leonard, quiet acknowledgement that she knows what this week marks the anniversary of. He only smiles in return and kisses her cheek because really, it doesn’t hurt anymore. “Come and eat,” she beckons, herding them to their usual seats at the table where their plates are already piled high, and when they feel as though they might die if they take another bite she returns from the kitchen with a cobbler. “Tell me about your lives.”

Jim goes first this week. “I found a permanent placement for the Miller kid.” It’s been an ongoing case of his this past month, trying to find a home for the young boy who had lost his only known family to an overdose; his slew of health problems had made the already difficult task near Herculean in undertaking. But the smile on his face as he delivers the good news matches the beams of pride from the others, and Jim ducks his head when he’s finally had his fill of it. “A couple in Vermont – great people. They’ve got two other intakes with similar issues, and Kenny seems to like them a lot.”

Spock rolls his shoulder around a bite of dessert, voice bland of emotion. “Jim and I got married last weekend,” he says simply, like it’s hardly deserving of notice, and seems oblivious to the way that everyone but Jim is gaping at them, mouths open.

“You know,” Jim attaches his words at the end of Spock’s, barely a pause between where one ends and the other begins, in a voice equally blasé. “For tax purposes.”

No one is particularly surprised by the news, but no one congratulates them either. Leonard figures he’ll save whatever well wishes for that child they’ll probably adopt one day – _you know_. For _tax purposes_. “Yeah,” he toasts half-heartedly with his glass, sharing a look with Nyota (and Savta, who shrugs her shoulders and raises her eyebrows in a doubly unspoken ‘eh, what can you do?’ before returning to her dessert). “Okay.” His brain is already caught up in the too many phone calls he’ll need to field as soon as the news hits their social media to manage much else, his parents and Jim’s dad and _god_ , probably even the Ambassador.

Nyota saves his sanity, and the evening, by leaning back in her chair and steering the conversation back somewhat on course. “I went to palm reader this week,” she tells them loudly, theatrically, and in the chair beside her Savta shakes her head in disgust and hisses out her offended opinion of such professionals. Building the drama of her story, Nyota takes a breath of time to contemplate her hand before letting it fall to rest against Leonard’s knee; she squeezes. “My heart line is very expressive. Apparently I’m in love.”

“Really?” In that single word, no one else in the world exists – no families or phone calls. It’s only Leonard and Nyota and the few, too many inches between them.

Whatever moment is building shatters in Nyota’s sharp, snorting laugh. “No, not really. Come on, Len, they’re all hacks.” Savta pats her cheek in agreement and, across the table, Spock and Jim raise their glasses in silent concurrence; Leonard only rolls his eyes. Catching the movement from the corner of her vision, the smirk on Nyota’s face softens into something tender and warm, and her hand squeezes again, just once, on Leonard’s knee. “Besides... I don’t need a fortune teller to tell me that.”


End file.
